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From Paragon Software Group:
Paragon Backup & Recovery Free Edition - a time-tested backup and recovery tool. With it, you will have full control over the security of your system and data. Based on solid commercial backup and recovery software from Paragon Software, Backup & Recovery Free Edition will give you a rich set of features that you can trust.
Free Edition can easily create an exact copy of your hard drive, including the operating system, applications, user settings, and all data. Differential backup will allow you to make a backup of only the changed data, thereby speeding up the process and considerably saving the backup storage space. You can place a backup image to a special secured place on the hard disk and get additional level of security to all archives which it contains. Paragon Backup & Recovery also helps you to choose any backup destination - including external storages, CD/DVD/Blu-ray discs, network as well as the secured hidden partition.
You'll be able to return the computer to a previous state without losing data and reinstalling and reconfiguring your programs just in one click any time you need it. Restore fast an entire disk, separate partitions or only files you need from the previously created backup image. Even more, you can use Restore with Shrink option - to restore a backup image to a free block of smaller size taking into account only the amount of actual data of the image. You can also create a bootable USB Flash Drive to recover your PC on demand and much more.
Protecting data today with Paragon Backup & Recovery Free Edition ensures a safe recovery tomorrow, so start your backups now. It is certified for Windows 8.

What's new in this version:

Version 2013 includes new program engine, full Windows 8 and Storage Spaces support.

The installation gets all the way to the end, throws up "Error 1751..." & reports something is missing from the installation package, and then rolls back the install and quits.

Summary

There is no info on Paragon's site or in the PDF manual about installation errors or how to fix them. If the download on CNET is corrupted all I can say is this isn't the first time I have found truncated/crapped download files on CNET.

Being able to easily make a backup is only part of what the software should do. The important thing is that if your system crashes and you need to do a system restore, it is easy to do. Paragon Backup & Recovery allows you to make a recovery CD which is necessary when your system crashes and you need to perform a full restore. The problem is that the recovery CD does not like my external hard drive and therefor does not allow me do perform the recovery function. I could most likely move the recovery data from the disk drive to a flash drive and perform the recovery from that but this is a step that you don't want to have to take when the sky is falling around you and everything that you touch seems to break.

If the recovery disk is going to have problems reading data off the disk drive, then the backup software should have stopped me from creating the backup.

This is a professional program that works well. It is a great way to make an image of your hard drive. I have burned images to DVD and saved to a USB drive. You can create a restore disk that can boot and restore your image.

Cons

When trying to restore using the boot disk, I had some trouble using the simple restore program. The restore worked fine using the full version of the program.

Summary

Now that Microsoft is going to kill off XP, it is time to save a good image of your XP computer. If your computer gets a virus or just starts running poorly in the future, you will not be able to reinstall XP. If you save an image, you can restore that image any time and have your PC back to normal.

Been using it for a while now, had to restore I think 4 times in 3 months this summer (2013) got hit with some nasty stuff, all went perfect. Only 1 instance where I had to repeat a backup due to failure!

Backed-up to the 2nd. hard drive. When attempted to RESTORE, I discovered that the drive letters *did not correspond to the WinXP assigned letters.*As a test, I tried to restore to one of the empty 3 partitions I had on the 2nd. hard drive --> the error msg. was "Impossible to restore." I guess the software is unable to restore from the back-up file residing on Windows partition on the 2nd. hard drive to an empty partition on the same drive.

I will have to install a 3rd. hard drive and try to Restore to this drive. Until than, I'll treat Paragon as unreliable back-up.

As far as I can tell, the free version is totally free and not a trial. The only condition for use is you must register in order to download it--Not a big deal.The interface is cleanly laid out and it's easy to use. Fairly snappy backup time. Restores without a problem. Had to restore one photo file after I accidentally deleted it. No problem finding it on the backup.

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